The large amounts of data that can be searched can present problems for maintaining not only a favorable user experience but also application efficiency when returning the search results in a reasonable time. Users and applications that search data sources can input search queries that return large amounts of data (e.g., databases, lists, tables, etc.) that can reduce application performance, cause errors or timeouts, and generally, impact operations and user experience.
In order to provide some measure of control over these problems, criteria can be imposed that reduces the amount of data that will be returned. However, these criteria can introduce additional problems. For example, in one application where the query requests a number of items from a database and the number of data items is higher than a configurable threshold, the query is terminated before being run. This is done to prevent the execution of queries that would excessively tax database resources and, consequently, degrade the performance and quality of service. From the perspective of the end user, this means that the ways of looking (the view) at large sets of data can appear to be broken. For example, even if loaded, the view may not display any of the data that matched the criteria specified.